


Heaven Sent the Saints Down (Hell Sent Them Up)

by Ambrosia



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, I don't think I was supposed to walk out of this season with this relationship, I'll take my trash crown back now thank you, news at eleven: i'm still trash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-05-31
Packaged: 2018-05-27 20:35:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6299413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ambrosia/pseuds/Ambrosia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But no, yes, the Punisher. In her apartment. Staring at her with an unfazed expression on his face. Even from the doorway, she can see the white skull painted on his chest-piece.</p><p>And this is somehow so normal for her, at this stage of her life, that she honestly takes one look at Frank, at the bruises on his face, at all his gear spread around her apartment, and says, “Okay. It’s 11:07. I haven’t eaten yet. I’m going to order some dim sum from the corner and you are not going to get any of that gun oil on my bed.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It’s not as if she goes _looking_ for trouble. Though, after a while, it does seem like she has ‘AFFILIATED WITH SEVERAL KNOWN VIGILANTES’ stapled to her forehead, complete with glue and glitter like some overzealous second-grade class project.

At least her position at the Bulletin means that she has an actual _reason_ to be poking around suspicious activity now. Her editorials and columns have gained a surprising amount of attention from other news media outlets. She’s getting calls about her information from StarkIndustries and the New Yorker, and even some institutions that she’s 95% sure aren’t actually legal. Every time something even remotely super-hero and vigilante related happens in the state of New York, Karen’s phone rings pretty much continuously.

Ellison makes awful jokes about it, but Karen is actually convinced that he’s going to be hiring her an assistant at any point in the near future.

And then, somehow, Frank Castle winds up in her new apartment.

Okay, no, really, honestly, Karen is actually rather fond of her new place. It’s certainly not a palace or one of those fancy-ass lofts on every sitcom taking place in New York in the last three decades, but it’s got actual rooms. And walls in between those rooms. Multiple rooms. And a roof that doesn’t leak. Plumbing that works. There isn’t any mold on the walls and quite frankly the rent makes her feel like she’s committing highway robbery. When she first moved from Vermont, there had been _broom closets_ more expensive than this.

And so far, she hasn’t been shot at while standing in it. Or knocked out and framed for murder to cover up a multi-million dollar fraud scheme by her previous employer by conveniently having her wake up next to a dead body.

Which is a significant improvement, in her opinion.

But no, yes, the Punisher. In her apartment. Staring at her with an unfazed expression on his face. Even from the doorway, she can see the white skull painted on his chest-piece.

And this is somehow so normal for her, at this stage of her life, that she honestly takes one look at Frank, at the bruises on his face, at all his gear spread around her apartment, and says, “Okay. It’s 11:07. I haven’t eaten yet. I’m going to order some dim sum from the corner and you are not going to get any of that gun oil on my bed.”

He doesn’t reply, and Karen honestly isn’t expecting him to, but she does notice that he moves something off of her bed and sets it on the floor.

She dials and orders. Close enough to her usual order that it probably won’t be seen as unusual, but also enough for two. Maybe she should have asked. Does he even like dim sum? She turns and pulls off her red coat as she waits, hanging it on the hook by the front door even as she can hear the continuing sound of a gun being cleaned.

The Punisher in full gear should really be making her more anxious than she feels, shouldn’t he? Somebody that wasn’t Karen Page would probably be running down the stairwell at the other end of the hallway outside, screaming for help. The last she heard, he was off doing his weekly mercenary thing. Yakuza last week. Italian Mob the week before. Drug Syndicate a month before that.

Then again, this ironically isn’t her first rodeo. This isn’t even her first rodeo with this _specific_ vigilante.

Somehow she can hear her own voice echoing in her head, all those months ago. “But, but, what about when the law fails? Like it did with me, like it did with Frank?”

Which, she doesn’t want to think about. Because she’d been standing in Matt’s apartment, not this one, before everything went to hell and everything changed. Accompanied by the biggest ‘hey, guess what?’ in the whole universe. Whatever had been between her and Matt, it seems like all of Hell’s Kitchen opened up and swallowed her whole. Like an invisible glass window has separated her from everything that had happened during her time at Nelson and Murdock.

She’s splashing her face in the kitchen sink when her alarm pings and she pushes the button to open the downstairs door. A few moments later and about sixty taps of her finger against the doorframe, and there’s a knock.

“Thank you,” she tells the kid. She’s seen him around before, but can’t quite remember his name. She gives him a tenner anyway because it’s all she has in her wallet, unless he wants a dollar and thirty-three cents. “Have a good night.”

Okay, so, maybe, it hadn’t occurred to her that it wasn’t the best idea to have someone bring up food to her door when the Punisher was servicing his literal killing machine on her bed, because when she turns back to him, he’s stepping out of the hallway that leads down to her bathroom and living room.

“Food,” she tells him, waving the plastic container in his general direction. “Even if you don’t eat it now, you should probably take it with you. I can’t imagine that you can get into many diners with the,” she pauses, waving her free hand towards the white skull on his chest. “You know.”

The fact that two months ago the man in her apartment was probably the most wanted man in New York goes unsaid.

“Where’s your .380?” he finally asks, wiping his hands.

“Purse,” Karen says.

He frowns. “You probably should have pulled it on me, instead of dropping your bag and ordering take out. Other murdering nutjobs probably don’t have my manners or house-training.”

His voice echoes strongly from the diner. “Yeah, well,” Karen tries. “Other ‘murdering nutjobs’ would have killed the delivery boy, not hidden in my bathroom.”

It does what Karen hopes it will: it eases the tension in the room. They both know that he doesn’t kill innocents, as he once tried so adamantly to convince her. And, sadly, even after the whole Matt debacle, she can no longer tell what’s more efficient: saving lives, or preventing them from needing to be saved in the first place. Not so long ago everything had seemed black and white, for her. Simple. Good people got good rewards and bad people got bad ones: only the law had failed her and failed so many others and Fisk had risen to power and nearly destroyed the whole city.

Now she can’t even tell light from dark. Just gray. Everything’s gray.

His dim sum goes untouched but Karen is just hungry enough to stand in her kitchenette and shove it into her face straight out of the plastic container with a fork. She chews, thinking about a million different things: the exposé on the S.H.I.E.L.D collapse that she’s in the process of writing, how the gang violence that's recently sprung up near 48th is going to make it difficult for her to get home from work if she starts routinely staying late, sending another bouquet of flowers to Mrs. Ulrich, or about how Frank looks better. Healthier. Like maybe he’s been doing okay the last few months.

“So, uhm,” she eventually says. “You wanna tell me why home base is suddenly my apartment?”

Castle immediately looks uncomfortable, which is odd, in his full Punisher gear. He takes his gun back into his hands and leans back against the wall, and continues to fiddle. “I was in a scrape about two blocks over and Red got involved. I ain’t particularly in the sermon mood, so I booked it.”

It takes half a second to realize who _Red_ is, and then Karen is trying to contain an ironic smile. But she figures that there’s a sort of understood rule about revealing someone’s secret identity for anybody that’s not Captain America or Black Widow, so she swallows it down. “Hiding from the Devil, huh? Pretty sure there are at least 300 folk songs about that.”

“I ain’t hidin’,” Frank tells her.

Somehow, Karen doesn’t believe him. Though they haven’t spoken in weeks, she somehow understands what it feels like to be on the other side of Matt Murdock’s sense of right and wrong. “You look better.”

He really does. Compared to the man that had been strapped down, beat up, and drugged up in that hospital bed, all that time ago, it’s like she’s staring at a completely different person. Granted, there’s a skull on his shirt, but there’s an alertness to his whole body that just wasn’t there the last time she’d seen him.

“I’ve seen worse,” he says, shrugging. “My head’s still banged up. But yeah.”

She shoves another mouthful towards her face, and because she is who she is, very nearly misses. “How’d you even find out where I live, anyway? Did my doorman let you in?”

The expectant look on her face tells Karen that it’s no-go on both counts: but surprisingly it floods her with relief. She won’t have to come up with an excuse for Kenneth as to why he had to let a man with a very big suspicious black bag up to her place. Or have to make excuses for the neighbors. She doesn't think he could pull off being her brother. Cousin, maybe? Ex-boyfriend. But knowing Frank, and Frank’s type, he probably got in through the window. Or the roof.

His face doesn’t change, but he says, “You have a rare talent for getting the wrong sort of attention. It’s cause you’re good,” Frank says. “You take in strays like Red an’ me. It’s weird. In this whole pit of shitheads and killers, and I somehow keep getting caught up with the one last good person in three square miles.”

“I’m not,” Karen tells him.

It takes a moment for him to stop twisting the barrel of his gun, and ironically it’s so big that she can’t tell where the original gun ended and his obvious modifications began. But when he does, his face dark and purple from all the bruising, he raises his left eyebrow. “Pretty sure you’re qualified for the next Sainthood, ma’am.”

The plastic container is empty, but Karen numbly plays with it. _Sainthood_. Saint Karen, Protector of Vigilantes and Justice and Josie’s Bar. 

It must say something about the person she’s become, how much she's changed, because something strange pools low in her belly. Adrenaline, maybe, by the way that her heart is suddenly smashing at some breakable surface inside of her chest. Like something's trying hard to break out. Suddenly she can't stand to be in the same hemisphere as somebody that would actually qualify for Sainthood. She doesn't deserve to breathe the air they breathe.

“Do you remember Wilson Fisk?”

Frank looks up from his gun, evaluates what must be the expression on her face, and nods. “Yeah, we’ve had the pleasure.”

She shouldn’t— this is probably, no, this is a bad plan from any angle she can look at it. But the future bestowal of _Sainthood_ sits heavy on her shoulders and chokes her lungs and feels slimey.

Karen swallows. “I don’t know if you were here when most of that happened,” she pauses. “For a while, Fisk wasn’t out in the open. He had his hands in everything, behind everything, but the face of his operation was his Second. Guy by the name of James Wesley.”

She’s never told anyone. Not Foggy, or Matt, though four months ago it felt like she could. Like they would understand and try to help but Matt has all but disappeared from the public eye, except when he’s wearing the mask, and Foggy is settling into his new gig on the other side of town. Matt would just be disappointed in her. Poor Foggy had enough stress on his plate. No, now, she wouldn’t tell either of them.

But with Frank, it’s somehow different. Like she’s staring into a mirror, or an imperfect reflection that somehow still manages to resonate with something deep inside her that she never plans to let out. And there is a tiny sliver of something in her chest that _wants_ to see what will happen. “A few days before Fisk was arrested, Wesley was shot in a Warehouse off 35 th and 10th.”

Frank doesn’t move, but she sees the beginning of recognition and understanding as it flares across his face.

“You shot him.”

Karen’s fingers drag along the back of the armchair Mrs. Hernandez from upstairs had given her when she moved out. Mindless. Remembering the dark warehouse. The table. The chair. Wesley. “Seven times.”

Frank laughs. Harsh. Like in that diner before he killed those two thugs. “I’m sorry?”

Karen repeats herself like she’s not just admitting to a Vigilante that she has _also_ murdered someone. Particularly one with a proclivity for punishing people that have hurt others. “I shot him seven times.”

All of a sudden, before she can really blink, Frank is in front of her where he hadn’t been two seconds before. “ _Tell me_.”

It feels like there’s some sort of dam breaking, and now that she’s started, she can’t seem to stop. She can't tell if she's scared, or petrified, or _elated_. “I’m not good,” she tells him again. “That .380 was on the table and his phone rang and I grabbed it. He didn’t believe I’d do it. But I did it.”

She won’t break and say that it _felt good_ , like some cheesy soap drama that her father used to watch religiously. That she had methodically pumped Wesley one bullet after another and laughed with it. No, in her head she had just been screaming: _stop_ , _stop_ , _stop_ , _stop_ , _stop_. No more. _No more_. No more dark alleyways or street corners, no more holding her keys in between her fingers like claws, no more triple bolting her front door at night. If she had to take one more moment of fear and suffering, she’d drown.

Suddenly she can’t meet his gaze, even though he’s inches from her face. “D-does that make me a bad person?” It takes all Karen has to keep standing there and not wobble, even though her work heels put her slightly off-balance. “Are you going to punish me, too? The last good person within three square miles?”

“Do you _want_ to be punished?”

On another person, that sentence might be sexual. Hell, even with Castle, it could be, and she can’t deny that the way that he slows his breath and lowers his voice sends something shooting down her spine, but there’s also something on his face that sees right into all the things that she’s struggling to hide.

“For a time,” she admits. “I did. I had nightmares. I kept waiting for the other pin to drop and Wilson Fisk would be standing there with the dead bodies of the rest of my friends.”

Was this some sort of penance? Her fight to save Frank from an unjust world and a system that failed more times than it succeeded, was that all it was? She didn’t want him to drown, because that meant that she’d drown, too? Was she all a lie? Was she just like the rest of the filth that he’d killed, or the filth that Daredevil locked away? How thick was the line that separated her from them? How easy was it to cross?

He says nothing. Just stares down into Karen, stares _through_ her like not even Matt had.

It seems like for a while he has nothing _to_ say, except neither does she, because she can’t tell anymore. She can’t tell from good or bad because everything in Hell’s Kitchen has suddenly become so goddamn complicated that she can hardly breathe. She puts her hands against her sides like she could somehow push her ribs back into place and hangs her head. Meanwhile, she knows, deep down, that if Wilson Fisk was standing right in front of her, without a doubt, she’d pull that damn .380 out of her bag and shoot him right in the head.

For Ben. And Mrs. Cardenas.

“You helped me remember,” Frank says quietly, like a confession, pulling her out of her own head. “The whole goddamn fuckin’ world wanted me in a chair and pumped full of poison, except you. At the very least, you wanted to get the truth for me, and my family. If that don’t get your hat into the Sainthood ring, I got no clue what will.”

She breathes out a shaky breath, trying to keep everything together and not falling apart like it wants to. “You figure?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Okay, so, Karen Page has maybe always found Frank Castle attractive. Maybe because she sat next to him for the entirety of the trainwreck of his trial when Matt Murdock was literally nowhere to be found— er, well, before she knew about the whole Daredevil bit. Maybe because of his stint in the hospital, for the concentrated honesty she could see on his face the whole time, or the confusion, or the hope. Maybe it was standing on the pier, numb, watching as they pulled body after body out of the water and hoping that it wouldn't be him. Maybe it was in the woods, hearing the gunshot in the distance. But it is difficult to find somebody sexually attractive when they are going on a massive murder spree across Hell’s Kitchen because of the brutal slaughter of his late wife and two young children. This is not a conducive environment for her sexual orientation.

But now, he’s got less bruises, he looks better, healthier, more centered in himself and his ethics and morals and his own code, standing in her apartment, about two inches from her own face, voice low and whispering and looking at her as if he can see even the darkest little flicker of light inside her and still considers her to be a good human being.

This, this is going to be a problem. Later. It’s gonna be a problem later.

“And Miss Page?”

“Yeah?”

“If you think I can’t tell the difference between mob hits and the murder of an innocent old lady and a woman turning a gun on her assailant,” Frank says, stepping closer. “You got a whole ‘nother thing comin’.”

She has to hold her breath, because he is literally about an inch away from her, and he’s so tall that he has to look straight down to meet her gaze. He moves to pick up his stuff, locking it all into place, and Karen wraps her arms around herself. But before he goes, he lingers. For what, she doesn’t know. She watches his face, his eyes, his hands, hoping that he doesn’t suddenly decide that she really is guilty and does deserve to be punished, or that she’s about to do something incredibly stupid and double down on kissing a Vigilante when he instead slides his hand over her left cheek and down to her chin. She leans into the warmth, enjoying it.

He seems to catch himself, drops his hand and clears his throat and adds, “Uhm. Have a good night, Miss Page.”

She smiles. “‘Night, Punisher. Do me a favor and don’t die, it’ll ruin my editorial.” She pauses, for a second, but then, “And take the Dim Sum.”

He grabs the styrofoam container on the way out the window.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You cannot be comfortable,” she complains, trying to push his other leg off onto the floor.
> 
> It works about as well as everything else in Karen’s life. Which is to say: not at fuckin’ all.
> 
> “Never said I was,” comes his voice, but his eyelids don’t twitch. He smiles. “Maybe I just like seein’ Saint Karen struggle.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OKAY listen just listen
> 
> I did not intend for this story to have a second chapter but look here I am, I'm ashamed, I'm totally not supposed to be writing my geology paper comparing the ecological impacts of volcanic eruptions to the possible ecological impacts of a supervolcano eruption i'm trash okay
> 
> [tumblr](http://www.valorious.tumblr.com)

The dim sum starts an avalanche that Karen Page is honestly neither prepared for, nor expecting. Not that it should surprise her, at this point. Somehow her life has become this running cosmic joke wherein everything that happens somehow just lands in her lap and she’s somehow supposed take it and hit the ground running.

Or it knocks on her front door, if she’s being perfectly honest. Climbs in the window. Down the fire escape.

“Hey, uh, Kare,” Foggy asks, a question hanging off the tone in his voice. She’s kicking off her heels while Foggy takes in all the glory of her living room— actual room, as he’s never been over to her new place. Including, apparently, the styrofoam container on the windowsill. “Is that?”

“Yep,” she says before he can even finish. “Looks like Teriyaki.”

“Uh huh.” Foggy says, confused. “And is that from our vigilante or from your vigilante?”

Somehow the styrofoam container in a white bag on her windowsill doesn’t exactly scream ‘Matt Murdock’ at her.

“I don’t _have_ a vigilante,” she says. But she also hasn’t told Foggy, yet. She hasn’t told him that Frank Castle showed up in her apartment with all of his guns and she didn’t call the police, because that would be the first thing that Foggy would suggest. That would be the first thing that anybody that wasn’t Karen Page would suggest.

And okay maybe she hasn’t told Foggy that Frank Castle caressed her cheek and Karen Page had felt trouble dig its way into her bones. And even worse, that she had liked it.

But regardless, she takes the Teriyaki and shares it with her possibly last remaining friend from her old life and listens while he tells her all about his new job and Karen doesn’t keep an eye on the window and a cold beer in the fridge, and doesn’t wait for fifteen minutes after Foggy hugs her goodbye. Nobody cracks open her window. Nobody knocks on her door.

But she puts the beer out on the fire escape before she heads to bed, anyway.

Her S.H.I.E.L.D exposé gets finished and printed: and it goes about as well as she expected. She gets several calls from unmarked numbers that sound like military to her, and at one point she feels like there are two guys that keep popping up whenever she heads to work in the morning. S.H.I.E.L.D and the other military branches have never gotten along, particularly with the corruption of Hydra, but there’s a huge difference between Karen Page, Journalist, taking them down, and S.H.I.E.L.D imploding on its own. But there’s a funny rumor going around Hell’s Kitchen that vigilantes start popping up like weeds— there’s the devil, the bringer of punishment, the spider, the immortal man, and some sort of Private Investigator that Foggy has been telling her about that can jump small buildings and pick up cars.

And maybe Karen Page has a couple of them on speed-dial.

Okay, well, she has one on speed-dial. Just from old habits and because she hasn’t bothered to reprogram her phone. The other one seems to have a sort of sense that tingles every time somebody comes at her with even the slightest intention of harm.

Or when she’s making a fresh cup of coffee.

Okay, if she's being perfectly honest, it probably  _would_ be easier if she had the other one on speed-dial, too, but that would be convenient. And, look, there are a lot of words that can be used to describe Frank Castle and 'convenient' is not one of them. 

And not just the vigilantes, either. StarkIndustries and Avenger’s Tower are goddamn crawling with them, these days.

She finds him sleeping on her couch the week after her two tweedle-dee and tweedle-dumbs disappear, except he’s too tall so his boots are propped up against the wall. “Goddammit, Frank.”

“Ma’am,” he says, without opening his eyes.

There’s no gun this time, at least not the giant one that he routinely lugs around Hell’s Kitchen, and he’s missing the skull chest-piece and the jacket. A social visit, maybe. Her grandmother said something once about ‘don’t never feed a stray cat, cause it’ll come back’. There was supposed to be a lesson about something that Karen can’t remember but she gets the gist of it.

Somehow she’s standing over a ‘stray cat’, only this one’s killed people and saved her life and stood in this very apartment, her imperfect, honest reflection, until she told him her biggest, darkest secret.

And now here they are.

“You _cannot_ be comfortable,” she complains, trying to push his other leg off onto the floor.

It works about as well as everything else in Karen’s life. Which is to say: not at fuckin’ all.

“Never said I was,” comes his voice, but his eyelids don’t twitch. He smiles. “Maybe I just like seein’ Saint Karen struggle.”

Karen blushes, remembers the night that _Saint Karen_ became a thing. She hopes he doesn’t open his eyes and catch the way that the nickname passes over her face. Weeks ago it felt like a heavy burden on her shoulders, but now, coming from the man that knows her so completely, without any masks or hidden secrets or mystery beginnings, it has dug itself into her chest and created this little heartbeat, almost. Something warm. Satisfying. Somehow it holds her up better than she had been holding herself up.

She still doesn’t feel like a Saint. Particularly when she looks at Frank. Particularly when she looks at Frank as he’s spread out on her second-hand couch.

Saints do not dream of demons, the way that Karen Page’s been dreamin’ about Frank Castle. “You hungry?”

“We’re running out of take-out places,” he tells her.

Stray vigilantes. Same principle?

Somehow they end up with Tuscan bruschetta and cheap wine, watching the latest news segment about Sokovia, talking idly about a ton of different things: her S.H.I.E.L.D exposé and his latest crusade, and to her surprise he holds nothing back. No gory detail goes untold. She can’t pass judgement over him anymore, even if she tried. She can’t. And after all of it, Karen falls asleep with her head resting against the Punisher’s shoulder and her legs tucked underneath her chin and her feet shoved under Frank’s thigh for warmth.

She wakes up the next morning in her own bed, with the distinct feeling that somebody had been laying on top of the covers not too long ago.

And, who knows? Maybe it’s having one single person on this earth know about Wesley, other than her. Maybe it’s the flash of a white skull on a building as she passes, but Karen sleeps better than she has in weeks. She still keeps the .380 in a holster under her jacket when she can get away with it, and in her purse on the days she can’t.

It becomes routine, for them. Drinks, food containers, bandages. At one point Karen finds a thigh holster tucked into the plastic bag that hides her dinner. Not really her style, with the skirts and pants she tends to wear, but you know? She appreciates it all the same.

It might come in handy sometime.

She leaves Frank’s coffee on the windowsill of the Bulletin in a thermos during the evening, the window cracked just enough to fit, and when she comes back from printing out a hardcopy for her to run through a secondary edit, it’s gone.

A note’s left in its place— a tiny, scratched skull and a quick message, code, of course, that he’ll be stopping by tomorrow night.

“Well, don’t you look like you just caught Tony Stark with his pants down,” Ellison says. He’s staring downward at his tablet even as Karen jumps about six inches off of her desk chair.

“We’d never print it,” she tells him, trying to divert his attention away from her face, which feels suddenly very, _very_ hot. “Tony Stark with his pants down around his ankles isn’t worth the cost of the paper it’d take to print it.”

Ellison seems to hum thoughtfully as he goes back to his tablet. “I was thinking ‘proverbial’ pants down. But I get your meaning. And there’s that Potts woman, too.”

She shuffles her notes around and wakes her computer up, trying to hide the way that the thought of Frank Castle dropping by and picking up coffee had plastered a sincere, goofy smile on her face. She’s supposed to be a professional. She’s not supposed to have a goddamn crush on a murderous vigilante.

“I think you have a thing for strawberry blondes in pencil skirts, boss,” she tells him. “Really gets your ‘Bulletin Exclusive’ mojo in a twist.”

“Go home, Page,” Ellison says, waving at her from over his shoulder.

It’s the little things. “Yeah, boss.”

Walking home at night no longer feels like she’s beckoning death with a smile and a crooked finger.

It’s so weird, too, how having vigilantes has changed Hell’s Kitchen. And if she’s being perfectly honest, the world— it changes ‘the rules’. The gangs stay clear of territory that has somehow been marked or claimed by different vigilantes. The cops routinely get people tied up and dropped off just outside the station. An informant that she’s questioning about the Superhero Registration Act has a devil’s head scratched into the doorframe of the front door to his apartment. Karen stares at it for a moment, filled with a sudden feeling that she can’t quite describe.

And maybe, maybe she goes home after eight hours of following lead after lead after lead, and maybe she stands in her apartment with the front door open and just stares at the doorframe. She thinks about carving something into her own, even almost reaches for the box-cutter that she keeps in her silverware drawer.

But then, at the same time, it feels almost unnecessary. Like maybe she’s got the Punisher’s skull carved into her chest. It feels like it burns coal-hot against her fingertips.

That isn’t the only marker that start to show up around Hell’s Kitchen, either. There’s a rumor going around that there’s a bar up on 42nd specifically for people like Matt and Frank, a place to go if the police can’t help you and the law would crumple under the weight of its own corruptedness. She does some preliminary research, because apparently the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen has taken up a very specific two-block radius as his turf.

Not that she could ever write an article about that. But she keeps it in a file buried in the virtual document maze that is her work laptop.

Two weeks after that, there’s a city-wide manhunt for a vigilante that shot up a human-trafficking ring down on 35th. Karen watches in abject horror from her office at the Bulletin. The scene they play over and over again is just a warehouse with broken glass surrounded by fifteen of New York’s finest, but she knows the signs all the same. It’s not even a question, as she stands there and tries not to panic and wonder _when_ , exactly, she started worrying about the Punisher’s safety.

And even worse, the public doesn’t seem to know that it’s Frank Castle, because Frank Castle has been dead for nearly six months. To them, the Punisher is just some phantom. A protector. They’ve started to paint tiny skulls around their homes and businesses and important belongings like somehow the symbol will ward off evil. At some point along the line, to the people of Hell’s Kitchen, the Punisher has become a God of Retribution. Frank Castle, Patron Saint of Revenge, Violence, and Vengeance. And dogs. And coffee.

Not somebody that brings her take out every other Thursday or falls asleep on her couch while he cleans his guns.

Without thinking and with barely enough executive function to grab her bag on the way out, she pushes past her co-workers and into the elevator, feeling something horrible burying itself in her gut. She doesn’t even wait, she just goes, because _goddammit_ this is somehow how her life is going at this point.

This is the part where Karen Page bursts through the door that leads from the building she lives in to the roof, spins around frantically, and finds Frank Castle slumped against the roof’s edge near the fire escape.

“ _Frank_ ,” Karen hisses, and drags him inside by the sleeve of his jacket, knowing that somebody’s gonna spot him from one of the other buildings and call the cops if she doesn’t get him out if his goddamn punishing outfit.

He’s too big for her to pick up, but she sort of uses the first stairwell to leverage herself so she gets her shoulder under his arms.

He seems lucid enough to put most of his weight on his feet. Or, at least, he tries.

She can’t even really see him in the shitty hallway light, but she can tell that he’s in a bad way. Worst he’s been in a while.

“I’m gonna go to jail,” Karen sighs as she shoves him in the supply closet when she hears something down the hall. She should have thought about this, planned it better. Maybe kept him on the roof for all that she now has to get him down another floor to her apartment. And Frank Castle is about 220 pounds of just muscle and deadweight. “I can’t go to jail, Frank, do you know how many people I’ve put in there? That’s not even counting the people I put away with Matt and Foggy, I’m talking about recently.”

Frank says nothing, but groans instead. It may be his particular brand of laughter, or it genuinely might be an indicator of pain.

The sheer thought of Wilson Fisk alone would normally be enough to make her jump out of bed with night terrors, but somehow Frank Castle’s blood on her shirt stems that particular reoccurring nightmare.

She peeks out of the closet, and when she thinks it’s all clear, she drags him back out again.

“It’s not like I’ve committed any serious crimes,” she tells him as they fall and stumble down the emergency stairway. “Breaking and entering. Bribery. There isn’t a body rotting somewhere that I shot seven times.”

He rouses at that, groans and puts his hand against his side. She tries not to think about the fact that when he pulls it away again, it’s covered in coagulating blood.

“You, you’re,” he tries. He looks a little punch drunk, arm slung around her shoulders. “Page, you are fuckin’ terrifying.”

She doesn’t answer; Karen hopes, briefly, that he isn’t leaving a trail of bloody hand-smears directly to her front door. But instead she pushes him up against the wall right next to her place and digs her keys out of her purse so they can tumble inside.

“A gentleman’d buy me a nice dinner first.”

“Oh,” Karen hisses, chest heaving, putting her weight on her forearms so she isn’t laying flush up against a vigilante who’s bleeding into her entryway carpet. “This is going _great_.”

Now that she can actually see him, he does look like hell. His face isn’t bruised up as much, at least, but he’s got several shallow cuts along his neck and hands that she could see, and she’d put a lot of money that there’s even more beneath his jacket.

“Did you get followed here, Frank?”

She already starts running thoughts through her head a mile a minute even as she yanks the sleeves of his jacket down so she can start to pull him out of it. She could call Matt. If Frank was followed, she only has her .380, and she already knows that it ain’t gonna do shit against whatever managed to do this. Maybe Foggy could get ahold of that other vigilante, the PI one.

“Lookit me, Saint Karen,” Frank says. His face is once again inches from hers. She has to repeatedly tuck her hair behind her ears to stop it from falling into his eyes. “Do I _look_ like the kinda dumbass that’d get tailed out of a fight?”

“No,” she tells him. “But you look like the kinda dumbass that’s gonna die on my floor.”

“M’fine.”

“I’m not a surgeon, Frank!” She tells him as he rolls over and tries to get to his feet. It’s a pitiful attempt, at best. “My definition of first aid is ‘wash with soap and water and slap a bandaid on it’!”

“M’ _fine_ ,” he repeats. He somehow manages to stand to his full height. She follows him up after kicking off her heels. “Cuts ar’just shallow. Just bruises mostly. Nothin’ broken. I got whacked by Red’s metal pole shit a couple times. I’ll live.”

Karen can honestly not even process the fact that he and Matt have gotten into another goddamn fight while in the middle of fighting _other_ people, so she shoves it aside. In the distance she can hear sirens and even though she knows that there is no possible way that they would ever find him, she can’t help but feel like they are coming straight towards them, like hellhounds.

Frank takes a step and then stumbles, clutching at his side. He catches himself against the wall of her bedroom.

“Whoah,” Karen says, getting an arm around his waist so she can help steady him. “I gotcha.”

The bathroom isn’t very far, maybe if she could get him next to the sink—

Frank Castle is _very_ close to her, she realizes.

Why does she always feel like Frank Castle can see every thought she’s ever had and every flicker of light that she’s ever felt?

And why the hell does it take her breath away so bad?

Frank has always been the most expressive man she’s ever met. She knew it in the hospital room, and in her old place that got shot to hell, and in that diner. She knew it weeks ago when she confessed, but it remains true. Even with what is probably the largest concussion to ever concuss itself on somebody, she can see every expression that passes over Frank Castle’s face. It’s probably why he favors the baseball cap when he’s in public. It’s all in his eyes.

She can see it all. Staring him down from three inches away, sharing the same oxygen to breathe. The affection. The longing. The struggle to push away and pull towards and protect. The conflict. She can see the want. The desire.

And, look, okay, honestly, it’s not as if she hasn’t caught herself drifting off into lala land over and over again about that night two months ago. Somehow the feeling of his hand against her cheek has managed to sear itself permanently into her short-term memory. She knows his smell from the nights that she winds up curled into his side, like woodsmoke and gunpowder. She swallows hard. Her heart starts banging against the inside of her chest. “Frank.”

“Can I,” he starts, voice low, rough, like he doesn’t want her to hear the question. “Sorry. Could I, uh—”

“If you don’t, I will,” she tells him, before lifting her hands to his shoulders and dragging him down.

That’s the only cue she’d ever need. The muffled noise of surprise, or shock, or something, that manages to escape out of his mouth is quickly replaced by her sigh, of finally, _finally_ being able to know what his skin tastes like.

Frank Castle kisses like he’s a drowning man in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and he’s desperate for one last breath of air. He’s all noises, noises that shouldn’t be coming from the Punisher, from a grown man, noises that in all aspects are just goddamn sinful. And his _hands_. They clutch at her hips so hard they'll bruise. It probably should matter to her that his hands are covered in his own blood, but it doesn’t. And despite his injuries, his grip is firm when they wind their way up from her waist to her wrists, leaving nothing untouched as they go.

“Frank,” Karen breathes. “You’ve got a concussion and you’re bleeding onto my floor.”

His lips move from Karen’s mouth to her jawline, alternating between which side he drags his teeth over. And God, if Karen doesn’t feel light-headed. His stubble just makes it worse by scratching against overstimulated skin. “I’ve had worse.”

“ _Frank_ ,” she hisses, and _goddammit_ , is that her voice? It sounds like a whine, more than anything, breathless and ‘weak at the knees’ level swooning. She clears her throat. “Castle, I am trying to stop you from passing out from blood loss and you are making that very difficult.”

His lips find hers again, and it completely breaks any train of thought that had been running through her head all together. She can’t help but lean into it, press further in, because holy _shit_. Sainthood might not be such a bad thing after all if this was on the comp list.

“Holy shit, Castle,” Karen sighs, banging her head against the wall as his teeth find her throat. “How long you been holding this back?”

“Weeks,” he groans. “Months.”

Ah, good, her pining hadn’t been exclusive, then. Well, that was a plus.

And Karen’s mind is saying ‘possible concussion and definite blood loss’ over and over again in her head, and yet at the same time she can’t seem to make her fingers obey what she’s trying to tell them. “Frank,” she sighs. “You wouldn’t be doing this if you weren’t bleeding out in my livingroom.”

It’s true. Frank Castle ran the hell away from her when his fingers had lingered on her cheek for too long and his eyes had flickered down to her lips one too many times.

“S’not true,” he says, pulling at her bottom lip with his teeth. “I’m just normally too much of a masochistic cocksucker. And I ain’t gonna be brave enough in the morning.”

Okay, listen, Frank Castle somehow has managed to find the exact recipe for ‘things that unexplainably activate Karen Page’s sexual orientation’. She doesn’t know how he did it, doesn’t know how he found out about it, but this, it’s working. But, you know. Bleeding dead-undead man. In her living room. Barely able to stand up.

The point is, as much as she wants whatever _this_ is, and oh, _God_ , does she want it, maybe doing it while her significant other is wounded, and possibly— definitely wanted for murder isn’t the best idea.

Karen smooths her hands of his shoulders and chest, enjoying the tactile responses that it gets her. Frank’s hands wrap around hers and bring them up to his face so he can press into them.

“I do want it,” Frank admits. She can see the way that his brow furrows. The intensity of his gaze comes back. He looks more like his regular self. “And I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t. You shouldn’t, neither.”

And if that isn’t just the dumbest thing she’s ever heard, and believe it or not, Karen Page has heard some pretty stupid things. Like trusting the justice system. And that the alcohol served at Josie’s Bar is up to code. “Not really the best at doing what I’m told, Frank.”

“I ruin good things like you, Page,” he says. He pulls his hands away and steps back just enough so that she can see him better. And he looks down at her blouse and frowns until she does too: as she suspected, the fabric is stained with bloody handprints. “I shouldn’t be here.”

But Karen Page has never been, will never be, a Saint.

She allows herself just one more moment of being tender with him, of unleashing this thing that he’s somehow planted inside her chest. She runs one hand through his hair while the other drags her nails around the side of his neck. He groans low in his throat.

“I ain’t the only good thing in this room, Castle.”

He looks as if he’s gearing up to turn away, like, gathering his strength. He grips his side and leans his forehead against hers. She can see the battle going on in his head.

For half a second, Karen’s sure that he’s going to pull a stereotypical vigilante and disappear into the night. But then, “Yes, ma’am.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Frank rolls over just as Karen turns his way and she gets an eye-full of everything from the tips of his fingers to the dip in his hips, which means that holy shit, somebody in charge upstairs somewhere is satisfied with her Punisher-wrangling powers. She already feels a flush creeping up her face and tries to avert her eyes to something slightly less tantalizing.
> 
> Until her whole world gets round-house kicked right in her fuckin’ face.
> 
> “Maria?” Frank asks, blinking the confusion out of his dark eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YES HELLO I AM HERE TO PUNCH YOU IN THE FACE WITH FEELS  
> [tumblr](http://www.valorious.tumblr.com)

Frank’s concussion lasts the night and well into the next morning. Karen finds herself doing something that she never thought she’d do— she pulls out Frank’s portable frequency scanner from his jacket and skims it regularly in case there’s any update on the manhunt. Most people on the scanner tend to think that it’s some sort of copycat, or a separate vigilante, because Frank Castle and the Punisher have been dead for six months.

They think it’s Matt. Or Cage. Or any of the half-dozen other vigilantes in Hell’s Kitchen.

Unfortunately, Karen knows that this won’t last. They’ll find too many bullet holes for Daredevil and too much blood for Luke. There can only be so many head-shots before the cops start whispering about the Punisher like he’ll get summoned if you say his name in front of a mirror three times.

The ‘copycat’ excuse might keep Frank safe for a while, but in the mean time, Karen Page has to come up with a way to not go into work this morning.

Also unfortunate that Ellison is a very smart guy, despite the first impression he makes on people. Karen knows that her ‘I need a sick day’ excuse, though she’s been saving it, isn’t gonna cut it. “I think I’ve got something brewing in that Hammer Industries case from last year.”

Ellison does not sound even a little bit interested. “Nobody gives a shit about Justin Hammer, Page, he’s been in prison for three years.”

She really has nothing on Hammer, but he’s an ex-military weapons developer with a very public case of corruption. There has to be something on him for her to dig up. She moves her cell from one hand to another as she starts her pot of coffee.

Somehow, this feels like a ‘on-my-fourth-pot-and-it’s-only-11am’ kinda day.

“And in any case, I want you on that MIT presentation that Stark’s doing next week, we could use a fluff piece with all those rumors about the Registration Act going around. Lotsa people getting angry about Sokovia. Call around, see if you can’t get a statement from StarkIndustries.”

That she can do. As long as she doesn’t have to head into the office in the next twenty-four hours. “Can do, Boss. Do let me know if anything earth-shattering happens.”

“Hell no,” Ellison sighs over the phone. “The amount of work I do for this company, when this rich bastard reveals he has an itty bitty green baby with Banner, it’s gonna be my name under the goddamn title.”

Karen fights off the image of a little green baby wrecking Harlem by scrunching her nose up and squeezing her eyes shut and holding her breath. She must make a noise because Ellison cackles once, hoarse and loud, and ends the call.

She checked on Frank multiple times through the night, making sure he’s still in the same condition. She patched up most of his wounds, too. The worst of it appears to be over, as least for as long as she can keep Frank on bedrest. If she were a betting girl, and she is only when she’s betting that Foggy will suggest shots whenever Josie is involved, she’ll bet that Frank will want to head out when the sun starts going down in eight hours.

This knowledge doesn’t stop Karen from having to lean against her kitchen counter and run a finger along her lips. They’re still swollen in a way that Karen never thought she’d feel. Last night her concern had quickly turned to actually, y’know, _saving his goddamn life_ , but now there’s an elephant in the room and his name is Frank Castle.

She shakes her head and grabs a spare cup of coffee because she knows it’ll be like waving a cooked steak in front of a sleeping pit-bull.

“Mornin’, Tall-Dark-and-Punishing,” Karen says, setting one cup down on the bedside table so she can drag the blinds in her bedroom windows open. He groans at it and she smiles. She tries to convince herself that the fluttering in her chest is just her hunger. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving and there’s a place on 35th and 8th that delivers take-out Crepes and I am inna mood.”

Frank rolls over just as Karen turns his way and she gets an eye-full of everything from the tips of his fingers to the dip in his hips, which means that _holy shit_ , somebody in charge upstairs somewhere is satisfied with her Punisher-wrangling powers. She already feels a flush creeping up her face and tries to avert her eyes to something slightly less tantalizing.

Until her whole world gets round-house kicked right in her fuckin’ face.

“Maria?” Frank asks, blinking the confusion out of his dark eyes.

Shooting her right through the brain would have been kinder. Her heart refuses to beat any more just on principle and every happy thought that had been in her head falls out of her body like heavy stones into a river. She drops the coffee and it soaks forgotten into the rug underneath her bed. She squeaks, “Frank?”

His expression immediately gets softer, kinder— _different_. This is a Frank Castle that Karen Page has never seen, not even last night when he was sighing into the space between her neck and shoulder. This is Frank, the husband and the father. The man who knew what it felt like to hold his children in his hands for the first time and not remember that his hands had also held them for the _last_ time. Not the Punisher, Patron Saint of Revenge and Judgement. Not her perfect match. “Hey, beautiful.”

Her legs are moving towards her bed in a panic before she can even really notice it because her whole goddamn world has just folded in on itself. There’s an alarm going off somewhere in her head but Karen can hardly hear it over the thundering of her heart in her ears.

His eyes follow her down as she collapses onto the rug next to her bedside table and she just stares, horrible blue and wide-eyed and terribly sad.

But also full of loss. It’s rolling around in Karen’s chest, the knowledge that she will literally never see this smile on Frank’s face ever again. This is a man that has tucked away all his demons because his heart is full of so much love.

This is a man that’s lying dead in the burnt ashes of his home. His heart is six feet underground in a box and he doesn’t even know it yet.

“Where’s Frankie?” Frank yawns, looking around the room. “Lisa?”

She swallows, wetting her dry lips, trying to get her heart so it’s not lodged in her throat and trying to choke her and smoothes her hand against his less-injured cheek. His three-day-old scruff left marks on her neck last night that she can still feel. Karen feels like she’s stealing into somebody else’s shoes, but tries to convince the person that will judge her upon her death that she’s doing it to soothe the heart of a dead man. “Asleep.”

The look on his face is unexpectedly intense, full of hidden meaning and want. He grins. Wolfish and wild. “Does that mean what I think it means?”

Karen can’t help but think of the night before: of his confession, the words he sighed against her lips, and somehow she will always go to hell because she knows what Frank Castle’s skin tastes like between her teeth— Saint or not. She might just be more demon than Saint, now. Because beneath the absolute horror that Frank is convinced that she is his dead fuckin’ wife smiling down at him, she can hear the way her heartbeat starts to thrum.

For a brief moment, Karen gets the sense that she is seeing something that he’d never want her to see. As easy as he peers into people, he keeps his walls up and only lets them down when he feels completely safe. “Frank,” she says again, pushing herself up to sit next to him. “You need to get some rest.”

He runs the back if his finger against her bare thigh, loose sleeping shorts doing absolutely nothing to protect Karen from the warmth of his skin. She inhales sharply because _fuck_. Fuck her. Why does the universe always decide to fuck her over at the last minute?

“Go back to sleep,” Karen tells him.

Frank nods, but not before lying back on her bed and taking her left wrist in his hands, sucking on her pulse point. He pulls at it with his teeth for one long moment.

The Frank that Karen knows is gruff and standoffish. A duality. She remembers how, after she told him about Wesley when all of this had first started, that he had briefly touched her cheek before catching himself in the act. He denied every last piece of his humanity and yet had let her drift off on his shoulder while they were watching whichever stupid movie had been on while they were eating take-out. He murders child molesters in the bloodiest way possible and yet is also somehow a magnet for every lost animal within two hundred yards— hell, sometimes they aren’t even lost, they just lumber away from their owners right into Frank’s arms.

Last night he had been touch-starved and punch-drunk and desperate for even just the slightest bit of human contact, she can see that now.

And if one tiny part of her heart had survived her family, her past, Wilson Fisk and Daredevil and the Punisher and that night in the woods, it’s dying now. There’s nothing left. This world has thrown everything at it can at her on a routine basis, but knowing that she is gonna have to rip this one last moment of happiness away from Frank Castle is gonna be the bullet that finally does her in.

“Frank,” she tells him, softer this time. She runs a shaking thumb of the hand that he’s holding over his chin and against his lower lip. He leans into the touch and lets his eyes close.

He must be more exhausted than he looks, because he strokes her arm a few times, lazily, but all the tension in his body bleeds out. Karen almost chokes on it, because she knows that feeling: it’s the feeling you get when you feel absolutely safe with somebody. Like nothin’ in the whole goddamn world could get to you.

It’s a feeling Frank Castle will never feel again.

Somehow Karen manages to extract herself from Frank’s side without waking him, and stumbles out of her bedroom and into the bathroom as quickly as possible so she can have a massive panic attack in private. She turns the shower on, but doesn’t step in. As the steam curls up the front of her mirror Karen puts a hand over her mouth and does her best not to scream.

An hour passing changes nothing except her position against the counter. After a while her legs start to wobble and she has to slide down onto her knees and has absolutely nothing in her head but last night, watching it over and over again, and letting it punish her.

She’s supposed to be a good person— okay, a decent person. Right? Even Frank had said so. _Saint_ _Karen_.

Then why does she feel like the worst person in the whole goddamn universe?

“Page?” Frank calls.

His voice is enough to drag her out of whatever state of distress she had been in. By the time she turns off the shower and runs a cool washcloth over her face and pulls the bathroom door open, Frank is trying to pull himself up against her headboard.

“Page,” he repeats with a groan. “What happened?”

“Easy, Frank,” she immediately pushes him down. “Easy.”

He blinks owlishly, and it should look ridiculous, should do nothing to lift the sudden weight of three souls dragging her down, but it does.

He’s so used to her ministrations by now that he doesn’t complain when she opens his eyes wide with her fingers or checks his face for bruises that may have formed overnight, fortunately he’s bruise free, sort-of, at the moment. She tries to be clinical about it, diligent, because yesterday was the worst she’s seen him look in months.

“I patched you up as best as I could,” she tells him. “But I still think we should call Claire.”

“Nah. I won’t survive another lecture from Nurse Temple, Page,” Frank tells her, while rubbing at the stitches at his side. Karen’s rushed attempt at stopping him from _bleeding out_ on her bathroom counter. “I’m fine. My head’s a little banged up, but I’ve had worse.”

 _I’ve had worse_.

Last night those words had seemed so reassuring, and now she swallows the lump in her throat and feels like they’ll be carved into her gravestone. _Here lies Karen Page_. _Killed Two People and Briefly Convinced a Murderer that she was his Dead Wife_.

She’ll be buried right next to Kevin, who’s tiny little patch of grass in Vermont read: _Kevin Page, Beloved Brother and Son, Taken Too Soon_.

It’s almost too much, again, so she makes some stupid excuse. She yanks her bloody blouse out of the hamper to see if she can’t get the stains out, to run back over to her kitchen and just inhale and try to get her own personal cosmos to realign and not go flying all over the place in one huge explosion. She feels like if she has to breathe the same air as Frank Castle for one more second she’ll spontaneously combust.

“Page,” Frank calls.

She blinks rapidly and hopes her voice won’t waver. “Yeah?”

“Why are there two spilled cups of coffee on that rug you got from that Aunt of your's upstate?”

Christ on a fuckin’ cracker, how has her life collapsed into this goddamn catastrophe?

Karen makes herself scarce as much as she possibly can in her own little apartment. She keeps the coffee going and pretends to stare at her open project on her laptop for hours, routinely leaning back in her chair to peer down the hallway and make sure that Frank’s still asleep. Every so often he groans and rolls over, or hobbles to her bathroom.

In which case she presses herself to the span of wall right besides her refrigerator so that he won't be able to see her.

Ideally at this point, she’d be lying face down into the carpet and having an existential crisis, but apparently the universe thinks that it can throw every fastball it can straight at her head and she’ll just keep runnin’ with it.

When night falls, thankfully, Frank makes no move to pull his usual ‘I’m fine’ and try to get back to 'work'. That says something about the way he feels, because Karen has seen him grit his teeth and suffer through a bullet that had gone in his shoulder and out his back without letting her or Claire take a look at it.

“Would you mind gettin’ me a couple towels, Page?” Frank asks, with a groan as she skirts around her bedroom without looking at him as much as physically possible. “I don’t want to bleed on that goddamn couch of yours.”

“You can take the bed, Frank,” she tells him, trying not to remember that morning and the way that his gaze had lingered on her lips. “God knows you don’t get to sleep in an actual bed much. Besides, that couch has carried me through many a deadline. Don’t you shit-talk my couch.”

“Hell, no,” Frank says, immediately moving to get up and wincing. “I ain’t takin’ your bed.”

He almost makes it all the way off her bed and onto the floor before Karen moves into his space and pushes him back down. She freezes, then, too, because she can _smell him_ , and it brings it all flooding back— the warmth, the kisses, the smell of his skin and how it tasted against her tongue. He freezes too, hand catching against hers, but she brushes it off and puts as much physical space between them as possible.

“Godammit, Page,” Frank complains.

“Okay, Frank, okay,” she gives in, because she’s a fool, because Karen Page has been and will always be the maker of her own goddamn demise. “I promise, scooch over. I’ll come to bed in a bit. Now get some rest.”

Frank simpers, actually _simpers_ , but he shoves one of her nice pillows behind his head in an angry fashion. “Yes, ma’am.”

She smiles like she would usually smile: something secret, filled with hidden meanings because that’s who they are. They’ve started this thing between the two of them, somehow, and she shoves down everything that she doesn’t want him to see. Over the years, Karen’s become very good at it. It’s not like she has two dead bodies and a handful of Vigilante secret identities floating around in her head.

She only hopes that Frank won’t be able to see right through her, for once.

By the time Frank’s fast asleep, she hangs her head and puts her hands on her hip and curses, “Well, fuck.”

Which is how she ends up buzzing Foggy’s very swanky new place some time past midnight. The feeling of the walls closing in on her had driven her out into the dark and into a cab. It’s only after she rings the bell that she realizes she could have called and that Foggy might be in the middle of something that Karen doesn’t really want to intrude on.

But he answers all the same. “If you aren’t dying, it can wait until morning.”

“Foggy,” she says. “I did something terrible.”

He doesn’t even wait, or pause, he just says, “Get the fuck in here, Karen.”

It turns out that Foggy’s building has not one, but three working elevators. From what he’d told her, his fast-track to partner meant that his firm pretty much _gave_ him an apartment in the building, in exchange for his nearly twenty-hour workday. And as much as Karen had watched as Nelson and Murdock burnt to the ground, as she stands in the elevator that doesn’t smell like urine, expired milk, or bad BO, she kinda envies him.

She isn’t even to the end of the hallway before Foggy’s door is open and she’s slipping through, right into what must be the beginnings of an all-nighter. Strangely enough, she knows the feeling.

Her words spill out before she can even really catalog and edit them, so she tells him everything that’s been happening recently: Frank, her job at the Bulletin, the fact that the Punisher lets himself in and out of her apartment any time he pleases. She tells him all the things that she’s been keeping from him, bar a few details.

James Wesley is going to rot in his grave for a couple more decades if Karen can help it. ‘Cause the worms and the rats deserve to feed on his flesh.

“Right, your fascination with Frank Castle’s case makes a lot more sense and you function as a homing beacon for all things superhero,” Foggy summarizes, with a completely serious look on his face while he hands her a glass of surprisingly not terrible wine. “Got it. Hit me with all the juicy deets.”

She groans, remembering too late that Foggy is good for bitching about life, not ripping into herself with nearly Catholic levels of doubt and self-loathing. If she had really wanted that, she woulda gone to see Matt.

Yes, because getting on the receiving end of Matt Murdock’s moral compass is exactly what she needs right now.

The ironic thing is, that statement is probably very true.

But now that she has a breath to actually breathe, she notices the many papers strewn through so much of his apartment that Karen can’t actually see the carpet or the living room table. She was right— he must be in the middle of prep for his next big case. She still has fond memories from the early days of Nelson and Murdock that haven’t become too tainted with spite.

“I shouldn’t be here,” Karen says, collapsing onto his couch. “Sorry, Foggy.”

“No, no, no,” Foggy tells her. He sits down a foot away and throws one of his arms over the back of his stupidly expensive sofa. “You don’t come to me in lost-puppy mode at one in the morning and then keep drama from me.”

“You hate drama,” Karen reminds him.

“I hate drama when it’s _my_ drama,” Foggy says. “Other people’s drama is like sixty pounds of heroin to a heroin addict. So make with the existential crisis and we can start bitching about our significant others with a six hundred dollar bottle of wine.”

Karen almost spits out the sip she had just taken and looks at her wine glass like it had personally called her a bitch on the subway. But at the same time, her genetic Vermont hoarding passed down through seven generations of Pages refuses to let her waste a single drop.

“Six _hundred_ dollars?” Karen demands.

Foggy shrugs. That amount would have given him a heart attack six months ago. “Marci has expensive but good taste. Make with the drama, Page, chop chop.”

“Okay,” Karen says, running a hand over her face. “Fuck, okay.”

She gives him the complete recap of yesterday, of standing in the main space of the Bulletin with all of her coworkers and staring up at the one tiny flatscreen they had on the wall.

“Shit,” Foggy says, when she tells him that Frank had laid low at her place after the manhunt yesterday. “Does Matt know?”

“No, and he’s never gonna know,” she admits.

“Right,” Foggy agrees. “Yeah, that’s, that’s probably for the best.”

She tells him about her and Frank, about the relationship they have somehow that’s straddling the lines between friends and something else entirely, about how two months ago they just started this _thing_ , this— take-out and movies and coffee and pressing her toes underneath his thighs to keep her feet warm and this, comfort? It’s some fucked up version of camaraderie, or something, or the sort of relationship that only bloodshed and life-debts can give to two people.

And weirdly for not being on the receiving end of Matt Murdock’s moral compass, she is doing a lot of confessing of things that she thought would never, _ever_ , leave her mouth.

Foggy snorts. “You _are_ a Saint, Karen. He’s right. If anybody does deserve that title, it’d be you.”

 _Christ_ , she internally swears. If she still qualifies for that Sainthood, she has some very serious questions for the person in charge of the whole Sainthood schtick. Their qualifications _suck ass_.

And then comes the bit that she’s still biting back.

“So he initiated,” Foggy assumes.

“Yes,” Karen answers. “…No. Sort of?”

“What’d he say?” Foggy asks, “What’d he say, exactly?”

Karen has to think long and hard because if she’s being perfectly honest, she can’t quite remember the exact details or the order of occurrence. She remembers kicking the roof access door open and having to drag him bodily down a flight of stairs to her floor, and falling in, and checking if he was all right. She remembers the cuts and the bruises, and Frank wobbling as he tried to stand up even as she told him to stay down.And then they were against the wall. “I think,” she tries. “He said something about ‘not being brave enough in the morning’.”

“Well, shit, Kare. That sounds like intent to me,” Foggy says. “Plain and simple. So what’s the big deal? Is it like an issue of consent?”

“No, God, Foggy,” Karen says, concerned that he would have to ask. “That’s not— that’s not the part that’s got me like this,” she gestures to herself. “I mean, God, it felt like it was consensual. There was, there was consenting involved.”

That honestly hadn’t even occurred to Karen. She’d put a stop to it before it had gone too far, for that exact reason. That isn’t the source of her guilt.

“Well, damn. I mean, if you ever tell Matt I’m saying this I’ll disown you and take you out of my will, but, _shit_ Karen,” Foggy sighs. “Get with the program and watch your social life deteriorate with the rest of us.”

He refills her glass as she groans into the cushion that she’s leaning against. “Foggy.”

“No, don’t ‘Foggy’ me,” he mocks. “So far I have seen nothing that screams ‘Karen Page is a maniac’.”

Hysteria starts bubbling up in her throat, and it isn’t from the wine. It’s that one special brand of panic that happens when you feel like your entire life is spinning dangerously out of control, like that one circle-spinny ride at the goddamn State Fair. “When he woke up this morning, he,” Karen pauses. “He thought I was Maria. His wife. He thought his kids were asleep in the other room and Foggy, he looked so happy.”

His face falls from its normal sarcastic fall back, but Foggy doesn’t answer, doesn’t offer her anything. She presses her fingertips into her eyelids and tries to squish the memory down so that she’ll never have to deal with it again. It doesn’t work. It’s gonna be branded into her brain for as long as she’s walking this earth.

Foggy finally prompts, “Kare?”

“Frank Castle has spent his whole goddamn life having things done to him, without his permission— hell, sometimes without his knowledge,” Karen explains, sitting up and gesturing wildly. “And the last thing, the _last_ _thing_ I wanted was to hop sides from somebody that does things _for him_ , that helps him, to does things _to him_. I don’t want to take away what little memories he has left.”

Half of Karen refuses to do that to him. She’d helped him remember, because he was her perfect reflection. If she could help him, redeem him, then maybe she wasn't so far gone, either. The other half would cut off her goddamn leg to be able to see Frank smile like that one more time. Like he was safe. Like he was happy. Like his demons weren’t trying to claw their way out through his grin.

“He’s,” Karen tries. “He’s my match. Seven billion people in the whole wide world and the universe saw fit to throw me in his path. I don’t know if I believe in any of the shit that they sell on Sunday but, he, I’ve never met somebody that saw right through me. He does that, you know? He can look into a person and see every bad thing and every character flaw. He reads you. He read me.”

Somehow they came from opposite sides: Karen, Patron Saint of Vigilantes and Justice, and Frank, Patron Saint of Revenge and Violence. And somehow, against all odds, they created something that harmonized. Something that made the shadows recede.

“Holy fuck, Kare,” Foggy says with his glass halfway to his lips. “You’re fuckin’ in love with Frank fuckin’ Castle.”

Karen chokes on her wine.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Of course not!” Karen shouts, raising her voice. “I had to, 'cause I went and did the stupidest thing I could think of!”
> 
> “Oh, yeah?” He challenges. “What’s that, Page?”
> 
> All the fight promptly leaves Karen. Like it never was, never had been. Maybe it’s the fact that she hasn’t slept for twenty-four hours, or the adrenaline from dragging him down from the roof is finally catching up to her— she certainly wouldn’t have been able to do that on her own power— but the reality of the truth weighs down on her more than any sin ever will.
> 
> Her voice sounds stupidly watery and wet when she says, “The one thing you could never forgive me for.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SHIT WHAT THE FUCK THIS WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE FOUR CHAPTERS???? NEARLY 5500 WORDS WHAT THE FUCK, BRAIN, THE FUCK????
> 
> [tumblr](http://www.valorious.tumblr.com)

For the first time that Karen can remember, she hopes that Frank will have up and left sometime in the six hours that she’s been gone. It wouldn’t be unusual, it’s just sort of the nature of Frank’s work. It’s how _they_ work. He stumbles into her apartment half-dead, she patches him up and provides the coffee, and he’s gone when she wakes up in the morning.

Except now it feels like she has ‘LOVES FRANK CASTLE’ stapled across her friggin’ forehead.

He’s— he’s gonna be able to tell. The moment he sees her, he’s gonna be able to tell. This, this is bad.

This is really bad.

And the worst part, the _worst_ part, as she was dragging her stupid all-nighter-having ass up the stairwell, is that somehow what had been a harmless little crush as of two or three weeks ago, a vague flirtation, a— okay she had acknowledged that Frank Castle did things to her sexual orientation a long time ago, but there was a huge difference between ‘you find him very attractive’ and… well, whatever they were.

Foggy’s words are both somehow lifting her up and pulling her down at the same time, and it itches. She wants to pull at her own strings and rip out this _thing_ inside her chest and see what’s been carved on the surface even as she stares at her own front door and frowns at it as if it had personally pissed her off. Except, at the same time, she knows that there’s gonna be the Punisher skull stamped all over her heart. No question. If somebody cut directly into her bloodstream she’d probably bleed black coffee and revenge.

And then without warning Frank yanks her door open. Karen jumps right out of her personal version of hell and yips, “ _Goddammit_ , Frank!”

He pulls her inside and then checks the hallway, shutting the door and bolting all three of her locks. “Jesus _Christ_ , Page,” he hisses. “I woke up and you were nowhere to be fuckin’ found, I thought you were dead!”

It takes a certain level of skill to both be brutish and roguish, Karen realizes, because Frank somehow manages to be both. He’s rough and tumble and yet she knows that his raised voice won’t even wake her neighbors, not even the nosy older gentleman from right above them.

And because she is who she is, suddenly two inches away from Frank’s shoulders, all she can see in the simple t-shirt he had raided from the back of her closet. Her new predicament acts like a big red flashing neon light in the shape of his shoulder blades and muscular back and her eyes catch on the faint stain of red against his left side. “You pulled your stitches,” Karen sighs. “Those took me almost an hour.”

She drops her purse like a bucket of heavy rocks and slips her jacket off while Frank grunts, ignoring her comment, and moves past her to do his routine, hobbling around her apartment barefooted while he checks the windows and fire escape, and doubles back for the front door, all the while muttering about how she needs another apartment upgrade and a better security system and double-paned bulletproof windows.

When he gets back to where she’s still standing, he’s obviously angry and still ready for a fight. She can already hear it happening in her head before he even opens his mouth. And normally she’d stand her ground, but in this instance she knows Frank would be right: walking all the way across town past midnight, even with her gun, was dangerous. Reckless. Bordering on idiotic.

And if Frank had done it in his state, she would have killed him. And then put him back together. And then killed him again.

Karen snaps her fingers twice and he understands what she wants him to do without having to say it: he strips his white shirt off so she can take a look at the worst wound on his side. He has cuts all along his arms and neck from some sort of weapon that Karen still doesn’t want to know about. A knife, maybe? Christ save her if they were actually swords, because her life is at that point where somebody could jump out of an alleyway and swing a sword at her neck and she wouldn’t even bat an _eye_.

But, luckily, only three of the seven stitches have slipped, and Karen really doesn’t want to have to go through that entire ordeal again. She grabs a butterfly suture from Frank’s first aid kit and presses it down.

And because she’s a goddamn masochist, she lets her fingers linger on his skin.

Frank winces when she finishes as he pulls his shirt back over his head. “The hell were you thinkin’, Page?”

Her history with lying to vigilantes isn’t exactly stellar, so after a moment of considering her options, she settles on the version of the truth that is the least likely to offer up this newfound realization on a silver platter. They don’t lie to one another. “I kinda wasn’t.”

She tosses the wrappers from the butterfly suture and other various first aid garbage into the freshly-emptied trash can three feet away and looks anywhere but in the direction Frank is still loitering.

It doesn’t matter that her hands are stained like a friggin’ church window with his blood. If a crime scene unit ever got their plastic-covered little grubby fingers on her stuff, every inch of it would be covered in evidence linking her to Frank Castle. Somewhere along the line her apartment has become equal parts weapons cache, safe house, home-base, and take-out delivery address. It hadn’t bothered her, before, because that’s just how her life went. But, now?

She isn’t sure when it became possible to get blindsided by a fuckin’ bus, but by God she’s managed to do it. _Frank Castle_.

This whole fuckin’ thing makes Matt’s devilish reveal look like the most predictable plot twist ever conceived by man.

As if he can somehow sense her shift in mood, which honestly wouldn’t surprise her, the tension seems to bleed out of him. Something different floods in, instead, something kinder, more gentle, even if they are Frank’s definitions of ‘kinder’ and ‘gentle’.

And she honestly can’t swallow it down, because, because, it feels like somehow her soul has come alive again after so many years of being a flickering, dying candle to a sudden burst as bright as the sun. And yet horribly, at the same time, it feels like Karen has been sentenced to hold that light for the rest of eternity. Atlas’ burden will be nothing compared to hers.

It’s such a stark combination that it’s giving Karen whiplash.

“Page,” Frank says, catching her hand as she tried to push past him. “I may not know a lot of things, but I know when somethin’ has you spooked.”

That’s the irony. He _does_. He always has. He sees through every crack that Karen tries to hide.

“How’s your head?” she asks instead.

It doesn’t fool him for a millisecond. “D’you know that you blink more often when you’re trying to keep your head together?”

Karen pulls away from his loose grip and stumbles as she slips out of her heels, now painfully aware of how fast she had been blinking just then. Like how you are completely unaware of how fast your heart is beating until something calls attention to it.

She slaps her right hand over her lips and tries to hold in the breath escaping from her lungs just as Frank says, “And you clamp a hand over your mouth when you’re trying to hold something back.”

_You’re fuckin’ in love with Frank fuckin’ Castle._

Those words are going to follow her for the rest of her life. Karen doesn’t know when her sanity just said ‘fuck you’ and quit, but it happened. It happened and now she’s standing in her friggin’ apartment barefooted and pink with blood.

“You were pretty badly concussed,” she tells him, wiping her hands with a dishtowel. “Do you remember the bit where you hauled yourself onto the roof of this building and I had to drag you and your punishing gear down a flight of stairs?”

He crosses the space between them like he was one half of a magnet and she was the other, he didn’t even seem to stride so much as move using nothing but the sheer force of his will. “ _Page_.”

And goddammit, she can’t stand him being this close, because then she has to see _it_. Every emotion as it flashes across his goddamn handsome face. The affection. The struggle to push away and pull towards and protect. The conflict. It makes her mouth run dry and her heart act like she just ran the goddamn New York City Marathon.

And, oh, this is heartbreak. It has to be.  It hurts, too, it hurts so goddamn much.  That soft place inside her chest feels like it's splitting into two. Part of Karen can’t even fathom how they’ve come to this place. How did she go from Union Allied Assistant to Paralegal to Investigative Reporter to Vigilante Accomplice? He’d once told her to hold onto the ones that can hurt you the most, a lifetime ago in a diner, but as she stares numbly at his lips for half a second, Karen realizes that she was never prepared for this. She is the one person who she’d never thought would hurt _him_.

Karen turns away, quickly, before it all spills out and searches for anything— anything, to keep her hands busy, because he’s gonna see, he’s gonna know—

“You know I don’t give a fuck if you wanna keep secrets from me, Page, but somethin’ tells me you’re more scared of yourself right now than anything else,” Frank’s rough hands catch around her slim wrists and stop her dead in her tracks. “Did somebody get to you?”

Of course that’s where his mind goes. It must be natural to him: scumbags and stalkers and child prostitution rings, those he can handle, he can _punish_. That is the kind of hurt he can swipe away from her skin with his bloody knuckles.

He doesn’t know the kind of hurt she felt yesterday when he looked up at her like he loved her with all of his heart. And he doesn’t know what kinda wound that look made, or the knowledge that Karen now holds tightly to her chest.

“You thought I was Maria,” she bites out. All she can see is a curtain of blonde and somehow that makes it better. She doesn’t have to look at him, she doesn’t have to see his face. But it doesn’t matter, ‘cause the way that the muscles in his hand twitch around her wrist is unmistakable.

The silence is also somehow deafening, but she’s frozen. His grip on her wrist isn’t even significant, but somehow just the feeling of his skin against hers is enough to root her to the spot like she was a goddamn tree. Frank could quite possibly feel how hard her heart is banging against the inside of her ribcage through the vein in her wrist.

“Karen,” Frank starts.

At the sound of his voice, she angles her face, her posture, back towards him. “You had a bad concussion,” Karen explains. “You asked me where Frankie and Lisa were,” at his children’s names, he flinches.

His eyes go dark. Dim and dark and inside a sadness grows that Karen can’t fathom. It’s one-half thousand yard stare and one-half seeing the ghosts seem to be standing just over her shoulder.

It’s so plain on his face that she has to fight the urge to turn and look where his eyes have strayed: but she knows that if she did, there would be nothing there. Frank’s lips are forming half-words, like he had when she’d crossed that red line nine months ago. Like he’s half-in and half-out of this reality and slipping into the next one. Some part of her wants to call out and drag him back, but the other part— the much more vocal part, refuses. Her whole purpose is to help him remember them. Always has been.

“So you left?” Frank finally asks, after what seems like hours. “You just… left?”

“No, Frank,” Karen tries, taking a deep breath. “You were happy, and needed to rest. I couldn’t take that away from you—and I wanted to give you some peace.”

It’s a bold-faced lie and Karen knows it. She left because she couldn’t breathe the same oxygen he was breathing. She couldn’t sit there and wish for that same smile, even though she knew with all her heart that she’d never get it.

Some Saint she is.

Frank’s nose scrunches in his ‘I’m sensing some bonafide bullshit’ way and Karen knows she’s been caught.

“So you ran,” Frank guesses.

“No!”

“Really?” he demands. “Cause I woke up an hour ago and you had vanished in thin fuckin’ air, Karen! Why, cause, cause my head’s fucked up? You run at the first sign of trouble?”

He throws it out there and probably doesn’t even mean to hit her where it hurts. It makes her start and makes her stop, all at once. The notion that she would leave him when he was hurting the most in that state goes so much against her character, against who she is— Karen Page pulled Grotto down that hallway in the hospital even when the man standing in front of her was some unseen assassin. She might not be a mercenary or a vigilante with super hearing or super speed or super strength, but _goddammit_ , she has stood up to much scarier things than Frank Castle.

“Of course not!” Karen shouts, raising her voice. “I had to, 'cause I went and did the stupidest thing I could think of!”

“Oh, yeah?” He challenges. “What’s that, Page?”

All the fight promptly leaves Karen. Like it never was, never had been. Maybe it’s the fact that she hasn’t slept for twenty-four hours, or the adrenaline from dragging him down from the roof is finally catching up to her— she certainly wouldn’t have been able to do that on her own power— but the reality of the truth drags her down more than any sin ever will.

Her voice sounds stupidly watery and wet when she says, “The one thing you could never forgive me for.”

Frank Castle has been able to see through her shit since day one: and this is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, she gets to watch his expression change as he understands what she means. He looks like she just took a sledgehammer to his brain and now all the tiny shattered pieces are falling.

She doesn’t even have to say it: _I love you_.

And yet it almost seems to radiate outward, from her heart, from her skin, from her fingertips, until it’s making her chest itch. Karen Page loves Frank Castle. Like a giant neon billboard roughly the size of Jupiter. It’s terrifying. It weighs her down and lifts her up all at the same time.

The word to describe Frank’s expression doesn’t exist in Karen’s everyday vocabulary. The closest she could possibly get would be _pole_ - _axed_. And yet not even pole-axed seems to do it justice.

“You can’t,” Frank says. “No, ma’am, you can’t.”

Either the city’s waking up or the two of them aren’t even breathing, because even that would be like thunderclaps fifteen feet above their heads or a gunshot two inches away from Karen’s right ear.

Frank’s chest is heaving, shaking his head like this is the most unbelievable lie that Karen’s ever tried to sneak past him and Karen’s trying to keep some weird level of hysteria down. It’s just, it’s under her skin. She can feel it running from somewhere deep in her chest to the very tips of her fingers.

And Karen, she doesn’t love easy. She learned her lesson early on: people leave. People always leave. Her brother, her father, Ben, Matt, Mrs. Cardenas. Fuck, even Grotto. It doesn’t matter if they choose to leave or if their stiff corpses were ripped from her still-bleeding fingertips. They’re gone and she’s left behind.

And yet there is still some part of Karen that loves so hard and so fiercely and with everything her poor, dilapidated heart can.

“I didn’t mean to, Frank,” Karen tells him. Her voice is so quiet that not even Matt could hear it. “I don’t know what happened.”

Nobody should ever want to feel whatever it is that’s clutching at her chest. This hurts. Like it’s not gravity keeping her feet on the ground anymore. When— when had she done this? When had her whole goddamn universe shifted so that everything she did and every thought she had wrapped itself around the Punisher? When had it happened? Was it gradual, like waves carving into rock face, or had it been sudden? Karen honestly can’t remember.

When had diners and take-outs and passing messages on paper coffee-cups turned into this? When had their unusual brand of camaraderie turned into something that hurt this bad?

All she knows is that the words had come out of Foggy’s mouth and it seemed like all nine planets had aligned. Everything had just made sense.

“You’re right,” Karen closes her eyes.

She tries to put her pieces back together because that’s what you do in Hell’s Kitchen. You pick up the pieces and make them work again, somehow, something that has been passed from parent to child and neighbor to neighbor. Prayers and vigilante-markings on door frames only go so far.

And yet.

“You’re right, Frank. I’m sorry,” she clears her throat and tells him without looking at him. “You, you should go before the sun comes up, otherwise you won’t be able to make it to your safehouse.”

It’s clinical. Removed. It’s the most restricted that she can make herself. Business-like. It has none of her usual conviction or investigative reporter steel.

Whoever had dragged him down a flight of stairs, she’s a shadow of them now. An after-image.

“Yeah,” Frank says, after a long moment. “Right.” His boots start scuffing on her wooden floors, and something that sounds like a bag being picked up close by.

It seems odd that after all that had just passed between them, ‘yeah’ is what she gets. It’s such a small, insignificant thing that can’t sum up all that they have been, all that they’ve just lost. It doesn’t stop the proverbial knife going right into her chest from hurting, doesn’t balm the pain.

But maybe ‘yeah’ is all that _can_ be said. Maybe it’s the only word that Frank can come up with.

When the shuffling stops and her front door creaks, she clamps a hand over her mouth again, trying to hold it in. Karen can’t even bring herself to look towards the door. She knows he’s gone. This was it, the defining moment where the lines were drawn and she just stepped right the fuck over them. It doesn’t matter that in another life she might have deserved him, or he might have been in a place where he could want her.

In this life, in this world, she’s come too late. His family is gone.

She’s the Patron Saint of Vigilantes and Justice and Josie’s Bar, and he’s passed into the mythical— more than human, more than just a man, but something else entirely. A demigod, one that offers up Vengeance for the vengeful and Retribution for those that are good enough to deserve it. He’s more symbol than person.

And the Patron Saint of Violence doesn’t have time for shitty movies and take-out with the likes of Karen Page. Can’t love her, either.

But this is the problem— she knows, on a logical level, that she shouldn’t _want_ his love. He’s got his own demons to deal with, and yet here she is, wanting it more than Karen has ever wanted anything else in the whole world. And yet every beat of painful heartbreak sounds like she’s sticking another nail in Maria Castle’s coffin.

She makes a frustrated wet noise, half sob, and has to breathe out through her nose to keep her spine straight. The urge to collapse into a little ball of exhaustion and stress is almost overwhelming, but Karen refuses to bend.

“Who the hell,” Frank says from her doorway. She jumps slightly, shrieks, thinking that he’d already gone, but he’s crossed his arms and is leaning against the wall of her living room. “Where the fuck is Karen Page? ‘Cause she don’t fuckin’ listen to anybody but her own goddamn conscious, let alone some asshole with a head wound!”

Pole-axed. That was a very good word. Karen only knows how it looks when Frank wears it on his face, but it definitely feels like she’s been pole-axed. “ _Frank_?”

He kicks her front door shut with a foot and steps forward with purpose, and Karen’s still so stunned that she’s stuck to the floor.

“Who are you?” Frank asks. “Cause Karen Page sure as fuck ain’t here right now, ma’am.”

Karen laughs, half hysteria and half watery breath, tilting her face up so that the wetness that’s starting to gather won’t drip down her face. “What d’you want me to say, Frank?” the smile that appears on her face is more brutal, more cutting. “You want me to go on a diatribe about how ‘the people that can hurt you are the ones that you should keep’? Or is this the bit where I beat three people to death while you hide in my stove?”

He steps closer. “ _There_ you are. Where the fuck have you been?”

Frank’s dark eyes both pierce and swallow, like she could drown in them and die happily.

Karen laughs again, stunned, disbelieving, that this is somehow who she is, or who she’s become, that she just confessed, and told him that he should leave, and he’s stubborn enough to stick around and wring more of the truth out of her like the last drop of coffee in a mug.

“Frank,” she tells him. She’s got no energy left. “I can’t do this.”

“Yeah, well,” Frank grunts. “I can’t either. I thought I told you to fuckin’ hold on, not send them packin’ through the front door!”

“I do!” Karen yells back, boiling up and desperate. “I do! I’ve held onto everybody I’ve ever cared about, but they leave! Matt left because,” and she chokes on it, because she _still_ won’t out Matt, even now, because she has to go and do a dumb thing like try to be a good goddamn _human being_ — “Because he kept secrets that he didn’t think I was strong enough to keep, Foggy left because Nelson and Murdock was dying horribly in a ditch, and _you_ ,” she exhales on a sharp, wet note.

She doesn’t even need to explain, or rehash. God knows that behind the take-out and saving each other’s lives over and over again that they’ve gone over that night in the woods. The expression on Frank’s face is more than enough to tell her that he’s remembering the same moment.

“I hold on with all the strength my hands can muster,” Karen tells him. She even mimes the action with her hands before using them to run frustrated fingers through her hair. “The problem is, I keep finding people that don’t want to hold onto _me_.”

She doesn’t know when that truth was ripped out of her soul, knows that it was probably Frank’s doing, but there it is— it’s out, it’s floating around in the universe and is somehow the whole sum of Karen’s entire being. The Truth. Capitalized. About her, about her life, about the way she lived, and she’s screaming herself hoarse at the Patron Saint of Revenge and Judgement. Because somehow that’s what her life has led up to at this point.

Frank frowns and scrunches his nose, like he’s having to roll the thought over and over again in his brain, inspect it, pick it apart like he would a person. “Yeah, well,” he says. “Maybe I would.”

Nope. Nope, no, _now_ Karen’s pole-axed. “…What?”

Now it’s Frank’s turn to scrub the buzzcut against his scalp.

“My old lady, she— she’s gone, okay, Page?” Frank demands, and for a moment he’s more Punisher than Frank Castle. “She’s been dead for nearly eighteen months now, okay? The mother of my children. My _kids._ And do you wanna know the biggest fuckin’ lie that I ever believed?”

Karen can’t even comprehend that level of pain, even though she’s no stranger to it. The closest she can come is Kevin, who left a brother-shaped gaping hole at her left shoulder for a good three years. That was about when she stopped turning to him to make him smile.

But her eyes catalogue every flinch across Frank’s face, because she knows his expressions better than she knows her own. His trigger finger twitches against his neck as he rubs it.

“That I died with them,” Frank continues. “Shit, I thought, I thought I would never breathe again or never get hungry again, never feel the warmth of the sun on my ugly fuckin’ face.”

All Karen can see is his smile, yesterday, something secret and knowing that passed between a couple that loved each other more than life itself, one that was intimate and familiar. She remembers the seductive, lip-biting quality to his grin.

It still hurts like a son of a bitch.

“I was ready to take her to my fuckin’ grave. I was ready to fuckin’— to fuckin’, I don’t know, stand vigilant over her gravestone until the day that my bones were too fuckin’ broken to move anymore and join her in the afterlife, or some shit, I don’t know, God knows I ain’t goin’ where she is, and then the whole fuckin’ universe decided to round-house kick me in the fuckin’ face, _again_ , and do you want know what that looked like?”

Karen has unfortunately always been a crier, regardless of what she’s feeling: stubbed a toe, got shot at, killed somebody, doesn’t matter, so the tears slip out without her permission. “What, Frank?”

She expects to see pain on his face, anguish, the kind of pain that only a person who has lost absolutely everything in life would know, but there’s a little bit of that wolfish grin back on his lips. “A leggy blonde paralegal walked into my hospital room and shoved my family right under my nose ‘cause I pissed her the fuck off.”

Karen inhales sharply.

He’s so close that she can feel the heat of his skin against her chest, and the breath that he exhales against her cheek, and for a big guy he somehow manages to encroach on her personal space without feeling like he’s backing her into a corner. It probably doesn’t help that everything starts rushing right back.

And it’s bullshit, Karen knows, because she had just tried to push him away, to keep them both safe, to keep them both happy where they could just go back to being what they were— but there isn’t anything on this goddamn earth that she wouldn’t give up to feel his lips against hers again.

“And _shit_ ,” Frank grunts. “She’s got these blue eyes, see? Like, blue— stupidly blue, ridiculously fuckin’ beautifully blue, and that first moment she threatened me has been permanently seared into my beat-up brain. I felt like I had been judged.”

She remembers it, too. It seems like a lifetime ago.

The now-Karen looks back for a moment at the then-Karen, and realizes that at that time she hadn’t known herself at all. She had no idea of how the person in that hospital bed was going to warp her reality. And even now, there is still some part of her stupid soul that wants to give him an out, an excuse, even if it’s just as simple as ‘you had a really friggin’ bad concussion, Frank’, so that he can go back and he can keep his past and his reality safely separate.

She wants so desperately to help keep him safe, like he kept her safe.

Frank’s eyes don’t pause on one part of her face, they flit around like he’s cataloging, like he takes apart his guns, like he’s trying to encode this particular moment in his brain.

“I’ll understand, Frank,” she tells him, swallowing hard, so hypnotized by his gaze that she almost has to pull herself away from staring at the serious curve of his mouth. “I’ll understand. I’ll never— I’ll never be able to make that stop hurting. I’ll never be able to fill the hole. It’s not too late.”

“It is, Page. It _is_ ,” Frank sighs. “I can’t, because now I know, and now that I know the truth anything I make up doesn’t even come close.”

Karen stills. “The truth?”

If Frank Castle had kissed like he’s a drowning man in the middle of the Pacific Ocean before, this kiss somehow rewrites Karen’s definition of ‘drowning man’ in its entirety. Before it was desperate, hungry, but this one is different and better, almost, because it’s smoother, deeper, more. All it takes is one spark before Karen snaps and grabs Frank by his belt and pulls him closer until she’s backed up against the side of her stupid couch.

She can’t help but lean into it, press further in, because holy _shit_.

Frank groans, his lips trailing along her skin and coming dangerously close to her neck. Karen can't stop, she couldn’t, it was too late, _she tried_ , but now the Hoover fuckin’ Dam had broken and she scratches at his skin, pulling him closer. They were skin against skin and yet it still wasn’t enough. She shifts her hips to accommodate him and he lets out a choked moan, his fingers digging into her waist to hold her still. “Say it.”

She has to shake her head like her ears are waterlogged, to get out of the well-kissed haze that he’s pulled her into. “You want me to— what?”

“Goddamn you, Page,” Frank mumbles, frustrated. “I need you to say it.”

Frank Castle doesn’t seem to understand that she needs easy access to oxygen to breathe, to inhale and to actually speak, because every other time she tries, he starts anew. Almost like he keeps forgetting want it feels like. Not that Karen’s complaining. At all.

The words come out easier than she had expected. Well, actually, no, to be fair, Karen had expected it to be about as easy as ripping her own fingernail off with a pair of rusty pliers. “Frank, I love—”

Frank doesn’t let her finish. He grabs at her face again and completely covers her mouth with his.

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to think that I wouldn't end up here again but I tell you what if I am going down I am taking as many of you fuckers with me as possible.
> 
> [tumblr](http://www.valorious.tumblr.com)


End file.
